Last month I launched my startup, www.shyne.io, as a way for anyone to get quick career advice from Fortune 500 Employees. It's essentially a marketplace with Sellers (Advisors) and Buyers (Members), and so far I've been extremely happy with the growth we've seen in the quality + quantity of Advisors that have signed up.

For the last month we've only focused on acquiring Sellers (Advisors), but now that we have a decent amount of talented people on our network, we need to shift our focus towards acquiring Buyers (Members). We've decided initially to go after college seniors + new grads who are looking for jobs, as they are the ones who are most in need of interview tips, career advice, salary negotiation help, etc etc.

With the 2014 school year starting, I'm trying to think of some creative ways to get the word out to college seniors. Let's assume my budget is ~$5000. I went to UC Berkeley and am going to go to their upcoming job fair and hand out cards, and also all the basic stuff like working with the career center, etc. But does anyone know something else I might be able to do? Totally don't mind paid advertising routes, I'm just kind of a newb with marketing and a bit unsure of which channels are the best to test for us.

What are some interesting ways to reach out to college seniors? I've thought about all the traditional ways, so I'm looking more for some creative ideas on how to get the word out. Kudos if you can suggest something that doesn't involve spending a ton of $$$. Would love to hear the thoughts of some marketing BFI'ers.

Ad placement on pornhub?

What does your service cost?

If it is something any random student can afford then you market differently than if it is out of reach for the majority of students.

No good advice from me unforetunately. I just post to compliment you on the idea and website. Smooth layout!

This is a great question, and I would say the average cost will be around $45 for each student. It's not super expensive, but I definitely expect some students to whiff for sure.

When I was a senior in college I definitely wanted to speak with someone in banking at Goldman Sachs for career advice/interview tips/etc, but it was really difficult to find someone on LinkedIn that was willing to spend time with me over the phone. I personally would've paid $45 for convenience in a heartbeat, but not sure what % of students would do the same.

Kind words are always appreciated- thank you sir! it makes me really happy to hear how our concept/design has been initially received.

I would've been bummed to have spent 6 months building something no one likes, haha.

It seems like the service is for students who don't have

A. Vision for their career.
B. Lack of motivation.
C. Not confident in themselves.

But overall, you are attracting the right crowd though.

One more thing, make sure to trademark Shyne so you could most likely buy off Shyne.com from whoever owns it. Your url extension is not user friendly.

Trademarked it when we first started the project. Unfortunately, Shyne.com is owned by puff daddy's record label (they used to have a rapper named Shyne), and they havent been willing to sell.

Haven't looked at the legal route yet, but I don't think it's the best use of time+money right now.

I really think you need to re-evaluate your marketing plan based on the average cost. If the average customer spends $45 and you collect 30% of that, you receive $15 per customer. Even if your margins were 100%, you simply cannot afford a high touch sales process because you earn so little from each customer. In the beginning, it could be worth it to do things that are not necessarily +EV from a time cost perspective, but I wouldnt be looking to do things that cost much money.

Since traditional paid advertising is basically out of the question, you should consider the many different forms of content marketing. I would start by writing a bunch of very high quality blog posts that collect some of the wisdom from the advisors on your site and working to get those posted as guest posts on large blogs with a following that matches your target demographics. At the end of these posts, you should have some sort of call to action that gets people to your site.

I would also strongly consider hosting webinars with an advisor and an influential blogger so that you can more easily demonstrate your value and piggyback off the blogger's audience.

There are a lot of options, but the single biggest thing you need to realize is that your low customer lifetime value severely limits most of the more traditional routes, so you need to look into mediums that allow you to reach big, relevant audiences without huge cash investments.

Not sure about advice for targeting seniors but curious if you have posted this to places like hackernews.com, producthunt.com, inbound.org etc.

Are you doing content marketing of any kind?

We've tried hacker news a few times, so far no luck. We'll be on Product Hunt this week (their CEO said most likely tomorrow). Will definitely look into inbound.org .

No content marketing yet, still tweaking/fixing bugs with the site. We're going to start soon though, just debating which topics college seniors want to hear most about.

I mentioned this in the last thread but most of your "advisers" should be embarrassed to be charging $2/minute for career advice.

Again I think this would be a huge hit in China & India.

How so?

For the buyers, are you expecting them to establish some sort of relationship with the advisor? Ie them being in contact with the same advisor multiple times? You could take a page out of Uber's playbook and give buyers some sort of one time discount or free first session if they refer another buyer. College kids love free ****. Word of mouth is vastly underrated, especially considered how connected the younger generation is today with twitter, fb, etc.

Any thoughts on expanding your scope to younger than college seniors? Most students are getting internships very early in their college careers (Jr, some even So), and you normally have to decide your major by those years as well. As a recent graduate, reflecting on when I first went to college I had no idea what I wanted to major in. Talking to someone with real world experience would definitely help guide you.

You don't mention the amount of time you get for $45. $45/minute is expensive. $45/hr is ridiculously cheap. For any reasonable amount of time $45 is too little. Thinking as a possible customer I would have serious concerns about the quality of the people I was being connected with at that price.

stupidest idea ever. no offence mate, but that site is a joke. To pay some money and speak by phone, are you serious? Think about something else. Forum/chat/newsletters/membership materials etc dunno, but phone is ridiculus.

I used to pay for speaking on the phone, back in 90s with girls, making "sexy noises"
Get Aletta Ocean, Jenna Jameson or some other porn stars and then you could charge money for speaking by phone... ohhh wait video chat is already invented.

Well, we've only launched for ~1 month and have already been increasing 30% in revenue each week (granted it's small, but it's a start)... so no complaints here.

I expected some 2p2 flaming though :]

(btw, the reason phone is not ridiculous at all is because that's normally how people get career advice from someone else. They usually ask someone to hop on a call to answer a bunch of different "What's it like to do Z" type questions")

Great mate! I am really sorry if my words sounded like a hate or troll, I didnt mean that. It was just my opinion with not so much formal words

Please, excuse me. I wish you all the best and good luck with your adventure!

1. China 1,366,130,000 August 13, 2014 19% Official population clock
2. India 1,247,890,000 August 13, 2014 17.4% Population clock

Mad competitions.

Was referring to the "I mentioned this in the last thread but most of your "advisers" should be embarrassed to be charging $2/minute for career advice." comment ?

Because "networking" is very well established as is right now in its current form and becoming much easier with LinkedIn. Most people in 100k+ jobs don't want to be a phone sex operator on the side and even if they do its bad for their image. God forbid you should speak to someone in a company you want to work at now and now you're in a situation where it looks like you've bribed your way in for $80.

I don't see how anyone would jump to the conclusion that your bribed your way in for $80. The concern is how much of a failure are you that you are willing to do this. Once he said $45 was the cost my expectation is that I'd be talking to the custodial staff. I'd have more confidence if the advisors were attracted to participate out of an appeal to mentoring than if they get paid so little.

That being said I don't necessarily see that as a critical flaw. The people who realize this were never going to use a service like this to begin with. The type of people who will use a service like this are unlikely to realize that and so desperate anyway that even if they do they will use it anyway.

I dont think the OP's site is mainly for networking as it is more for "getting feedback." What kind of senior/mid-level person wants to connect with a fresh graduate?

But I do agree with you. Like I've said earlier, people that KNOW they have the skills/experience/connection won't be using this. Only the people who don't have it will probably need it to get an edge, out of desperation, etc.

OP said he tried to get in contact with someone from GS but he had a hard time. It's not that you had a hard time connecting with someone, it's just the fact that you have no exclusivity for yourself. What's the merit for them to connect with you? Graduating with Berkley won't do much unless you go for masters. I think you could have worked for GS operations side in Utah if you really tried but that might have not met your "standards." I mean a UC Berkley graudate don't want to start from a $50-60k salary while putting in 70 hours a week right?

Either you got the specs and start high or you are going to have to start from the ground up and put in the hard work. I like that your idea started to solve a "PROBLEM" but that problem needs to be everyone's problems, not just yours or some part of the graduates.

Actually, startups that try to solve everyone's problems are ones that generally fail. Trying to please everyone will end up pleasing no one. You need to focus on the people who love your product and build off them, not the ones who think you're going to tank + wouldn't ever use it.

We're just getting started and there is definitely work that needs to be done in order to optimize our pricing, but we haven't had many complaints thus far from our on-boarding of Advisors. We made a lot of leap-of-faith assumptions for our initial pricing, but that's to be expected with any startup. We can easily adjust this later on.

$2/minute = $120/hr. At 40/hr week, thats $250k. We tried to create a rate that was high enough to make it worth their time to speak to someone... to the exact minute (I'm not saying they are going to make 250k on our site, but I'm saying that their pricing is more than generous relative to most of our Advisors' salaries). Every minute they spend helping someone.... they are compensated appropriately - believe it or not, that actually is incentive for mid/high-level people to help younger candidates. We've already seen the # of calls taken grow every week, and our Advisors are ecstatic about how the money just appears in their bank account the next day.

I think this is actually a great idea if you can execute it right which appears like you are off to a great start for being at such an early stage as well.

I personally think you are not charging enough to the end user.

You absolutely have to get a .com website.

How much do you rake from the advisers?